The marriage breaking aspect: experiences of the MBA

Abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to investigate an aspect of undertaking a part‐time Masters of Business Administration (MBA) that has been discussed informally but has not been researched – that a proportion of MBA students who start their studies within a marriage are likely to end up with the qualification, but without the spouse.Design/methodology/approachThe site of the research was a part‐time MBA programme delivered by a university in the south‐east of England. It was a degree lasting two calendar years, designed for practising middle and senior managers, and was run for five years before being disbanded in the late 1990s. The population was made up of three cohorts of students – there were ten graduates from the first intake, 11 from second; and nine from the third and last group. The research approach was qualitative, relying on conversations, interviews, and documents.FindingsThe study finds that in each cohort, marriages came under severe strain and a number of these ended very painfully. The paper is anecdotal and puts forward no solutions. Instead, it attempts to shed some light on a phenomenon that proved, for the MBA students involved, to be destructive in the short term, but constructive in the long term.Practical implicationsThe paper examines the marriage breaking aspect of the MBA, and attempts to find some explanation for what happened, by examining the inter‐relationship between home, work and study, and between husbands and wives. Their experiences may be of use to designers of MBA programmes and those who lecture on them.Originality/valueThe paper deals with an aspect of the MBA which is generally absent from the literature and which reveals an unexpected downside to what is supposed to be a productive and rewarding educational experience.